The Times reports that 51% percent of women are living without a husband.
In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000.
More women are divorced, never married, or living with a partner. The article interviews various happy, single women who find great strength in their singleness. I couldn’t help wondering if the article was a little one-sided. What was their socio-economic status compared to married women? How many women in that group were struggling and supporting three kids on their own on a waitress salary?
But I don’t mean to rain on the parade. I think it’s fabulous that more women have more options than ever before.
The article briefly mentions the impact of this major sociological shift on politics.
Coupled with the fact that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time, the trend could ultimately shape social and workplace policies, including the ways government and employers distribute benefits.
However, the article doesn’t expand on this observation. I like to think that they are right. The 51% tipping point might force businesses and politicians to make more female and family-friendly changes. Single women may have more clout than married women. There is always the assumption that married women have their husband’s salaries to fall back upon. Their jobs are considered optional, so there’s no pressure to improve daycare, no accommodations at the workplace, and no support from the school system. There are very strong resentments against married women with kids and prejudice lurks around the edges. Perhaps the Murphy Browns have more a chance of making change than June Cleaver. Which is fine. I’ll take change from any corner.
Am I right? Who gets more respect? Married women or single? Which group has a better shot at making changes.
Apt. 11d 
Single women are far from a monolithic bloc. Some are affluent or at least comfortable, and happy as clams – others are struggling, miserable, and lonely. Same as single men, in fact. Funny we don’t hear much about the latter.
One thing about the surge in singleness that has done worlds of good for women is given them alternatives to an unhappy marriage on the one hand, or lifelong sexlessness and living with parents on the other. Remember Evelyn Ryan in The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio? Her husband was nothing but an albatross around her and her kids’ necks. I bet Evelyn would have led a better and happier life could she have chosen the divorcee route.
As far as marketing is concerned, single women have made huge inroads in a very important market – homeownership. Single women are far, far more likely to own their own homes than single men are.
Politically, it will be interesting to see. The kind of women who are most likely to make a difference in this arena are the ones most likely to vote in the first place – well-off, college-educated women. Poor, single moms often do not vote at all. So to the extent that single women influence politics, I surmise it will be heavily tilted towards the Murphy Browns. FWIW, these women tend to vote heavily Democrat/progressive.
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Homeownership actually cuts both ways–if the housing bears are correct, single women homeowners could be in much more jeopardy than their renting male counterparts.
I wonder whether there are any Murphy Browns. At least living in upper middle class Washington DC, I’ve never encountered anybody that fit that description–prosperous, career-minded single mother who’s got it all together. The upper-middle class mothers I know in DC are all married, while the single mothers I know (none in DC) all struggle. I’ve long noted that there are practically no single mothers who participate actively on the big DC mothers’ list-serve that I’ve been on for several years. There are, of course, plenty of single mothers in the DC area, but a “middle class” lifestyle can’t be sustained in a high-cost area by one normal wage-earner with kids and no adult back-up at home–it’s quite difficult even when one has another adult around.
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I don’t know if this is an aging thing or a status-as-parent thing, but I personally feel that mothers are viewed as mothers first, people second. I feel I’m always viewed through that lens. It’s dehumanizing.
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Hi Laura—sometime reader, first-time (I think) commenter here at your place.
It seems to me that this news is good for women only if that 51% in question actually want to be single; if they would prefer to be married, this may indeed be bad news. Furthermore, as you hint and the article notes, singleness is distributed extremely unevenly across the demographic categories: at the coincidence of particular slices of race and class, marriage has virtually disappeared, whereas it is still very much a live option in other places. In other words, the increased incidence of singleness may suggest that some women have more freedom to choose a family-configuration than they have enjoyed in the past, but it almost certainly suggests as well that other women have much, much less.
Indeed, I suspect that Murphy Brown—that is, white, college-educated, upper-middle-class, thirty/fortyish, with child(ren)—is, in 2007, more *likely* to be married, or to want and expect to be married someday, than virtually any other kind of woman.
I also wonder a bit about the optimistic predictions of re-shaped “social and work policies.” As far as I can tell, this basically translates to “universal daycare”—but as your brave personal post below suggests, daycare alone will never be enough. Mothers and children need functional extended family networks—and marriage greatly increases a mother’s access to this sort of social capital through the network of in-law kin she acquires.
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The survey includes 15 year olds. I am not worried about single 15 year olds.
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“marriage greatly increases a mother’s access to this sort of social capital through the network of in-law kin she acquires.”
That is an excellent point. I would also note the cross-generational effect. If grandma is poor and divorced or single, she has that much less to give her daughter the single mother, no matter how much she would like to give. Over time, the disparity between the descendants of the married and unmarried families grows exponentially.
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Hey Laura,
I thought the NY Times article was way unbalanced. Like every single one of the women living without a husband is doing it out of choice? It’s a much more complex story than the way it was presented.
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I feel fairly confident in saying that married women continue to hold more power in this society. There are any number of studies that show that people stigmatize those people who are not married…and a recent book by Bella DePaulo talks about the extent of that stigma. It’s a good read for anyone who is interested.
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I know at least one “murphy brown”, if by that we mean a single, affluent, white woman with children. Some percent of women in that category have parenting partners (I know 2 who started out like MB, but then married the father of their child). Others have female parenting partners (though that’s becoming more public these days).
bj
PS: I think the kind of woman who is going to change the workplace is the one who shows the workplace why it’s necessary. It’s going to be done out of necessity, not compassion. My vote is for Jen at Penguin Unearthed http://penguinunearthed.wordpress.com/.
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First comment, here. Hi!
My take: the category of women who are single/divorced/widowed/living with an unmarried partner is so varied as to be useless. Can you lump together a high-achieving single career woman and a shocked divorcee newly working at Macy’s? And then lump together the wife in a two-career family and a SAHM a few years away from being a shocked divorcee herself? I hate to say it, but I think the real dichotomy is between the committed careerists of any marital status and the drop-outs/dilettantes.
Changes within the workplace (if we’re talking about flexibility and family-friendly policies) will be forced by those who need them – usually mothers, married or not – who add enough value to the bottom line to have some clout.
Changes in public policy that favor working women/mothers over tradition one-career families? I think SAH motherhood is a sacred cow, and we’d need more than 51% of anything to kill it.
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I wonder if the real change in the workplace will have nothing to do with men or women – rather, I surmise, it will have to do with the baby boomers retiring or dying and companies no longer having a glut of talent vying for available jobs.
When good people are more at a premium, companies will have to do more to please them and keep them happy.
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Welcome new commenters!
I think we all saw the major problem of the article. They forgot to mention all that there are a great number of single women with children and without education or skills. Those are tough barriers to overcome without a partner. Some areas, like Amy’s DC, may be too tough for even educated women with kids to get by on their own.
I like that you all saw real problems with that notion that single women can be lumped together and seen as a force for change. The single woman category encompasses too many types of women with entirely different needs.
re: status. Jen, yeah, I have always had big problems with the “mommy” lens. Trouble is in a few years, I’m going to get the “granny” lens. Spinsterwitch, I appreciate your comment that single women have lower status. I don’t know. Mulling things over.
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Moms get the most respect from me and single moms even more so.
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Okay, that NYT article was a complete fabrication. US Census data says that 56% of adult women ARE married. The author concocted that minority number by including teenage girls living at home, widows, and women whose husbands are in jail or in the military. Lies, lies lies.
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Artemesia, you categorize women as either commited careerists or dropout/dilletantes? Pulleeze. You have a lot more reading to do!
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I also wonder a bit about the optimistic predictions of re-shaped “social and work policies.” As far as I can tell, this basically translates to “universal daycare”—but as your brave personal post below suggests, daycare alone will never be enough.
Oh, f*** me rigid. Daycare (Quality daycare, not shit like ABC Learning, the for-profit child care corporation here in Australia) is absolutely necessary for balancing work and family. No one has ever said that daycare alone is the answer to everything– advocates for work/family balance invariably mention parental leave and other measures as well. Daycare is important, very important, but somehow it always gets sidelined as a chick’s issue.
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